'Sold on Song' : 31 May 2004

Gary's whole interview may be heard here; or you may prefer to read the transcript below.

Jingle:
Celebrating great songs and songwriting, the Radio 2 Sold On Song Top 30 [sic!] Poll, as voted for by you, BBC Radio 2.

Gary Brooker (Procol Harum)
Well thank you very much. It’s great news. Thank you to all your listeners. We know you’re the top station in the country, so ... we must be the top of the top.

Well, we did actually make a demo of A Whiter Shade of Pale and it sounded very much like the finished original. But we took that round to quite a few people that I'd had contact from being in The Paramounts before, George Martin, Ron Richards, Andrew Loog Oldham …

And for whatever reasons none of them saw any light in it whatsoever: TThey thought it was a bit long. And it’s very strange, that, because you’d have thought they’d have had the ears to go, you know, "Hang on, that’s a bit of a hit." And in the end, it was our publishers at the time who had their own record company: Denny Cordell, obviously spotted ... and David Platz, the publisher. And so we went and really made it ourselves with that team.

Everything fell into place very quickly. In fact, we weren’t entirely ready for it, if the truth be known, because it was very, very quick. There was no hype or build-up before. It’s just suddenly everybody wanted to hear this song. They couldn’t live without it. And we had to go and buy stage clothes and sack our manager and sort the band out and lots of different things.

A tower block’s-full of A4 has been written about what the lyrics mean. That’s one thing you share with Don McLean in American Pie because every time we play these two records somebody always says, "What’s it all about?" And I suspect it’s all summed up in the last two lines: "So we crash-dived straightway quickly and attacked the ocean bed".

When we made it, we wrote it and it had four verses but we decided that at eight minutes long, we were going over the top, so we cut it down to three verses for our demo that we made. And that was still rather long so we then cut it down to two. And that was still, even for those days, like nearly four-and-a-half minutes or something, was quite a lot, a very long record.

Do I know? That’s the question. Does Keith Reid know? And he wrote it. It doesn’t really matter what it’s about. Of course, it’s thoughts and it’s feelings. I think one of the things about it, perhaps made it last, and it’s just my viewpoint, is that it is a bit mysterious. It’s quite extraordinary that one of the, what seems to be one of the most popular records, as you say, of all time, in fact the most popular record of all time, and a lot of people don’t know what the words mean. And a lot, some people like, you know, down on record like Tony Blackburn or somebody will say, "It’s complete and utter rubbish." I don’t think it’s complete and utter rubbish. I know it’s very, very well-written words.

Thank you, thank you listeners. Have a good Bank-holiday.

A Whiter Shade of Pale plays.